Next Shows at The Arts Café Mystic - The LaGrua Center

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Featured Poet, Stephanie Burt

Stephanie Burt is a poet, literary critic, and professor with nine published books, including two critical books on poetry and three poetry collections. Her essay collection Close Calls with Nonsense was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her other works include Taylor’s Version: The Poetic and Musical Genius of Taylor Swift; We Are Mermaids; Advice from the Lights; The Poem is You: 60 Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them; The Art of the Sonnet; Something Understood: Essays and Poetry for Helen Vendler; The Forms of Youth: Adolescence and 20th Century Poetry; Parallel Play: Poems; Randall Jarrell on W. H. Auden; and Randall Jarrell and His Age. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, The Believer, and the Boston Review. 

Featured Poet, Christie Max Williams

Christie Max Williams is a poet and actor. His debut poetry collection, The Wages of Love, won the William Meredith Poetry Prize and North Street Book Prize.  He also recently won the competition for and was appointed the inaugural Poet Laureate of Stonington, Connecticut. His poetry has been published in journals, magazines, and anthologies, and has won the Grolier Prize and Connecticut River Review Prize and was a finalist for the National Poetry Series. He co-founded and for many years directed The Arts Café Mystic, which is in its 34th year of presenting America’s best poets and New England’s finest musicians. He has worked as a leading actor on stage and screen in California, New York, and Connecticut. He also worked as a fruit vendor in Paris, a salmon fisherman in Alaska, a consultant on Wall Street, a writer for the National Audubon Society, a wine grape harvester in Chateauneuf du Pape, and in leadership posts for non-profit organizations in whose causes he believes. Though originally from California and then New York City, he now lives in Mystic Connecticut, where he and his wife raised their daughter and son.

Featured Poet, Philip Schultz

Philip Schultz is the author of several collections of poetry, including Failure, winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize. His other collections include Enormous Morning, Luxury, The Wherewithal: A Novel in Verse, The God of Loneliness: New and Selected Poems, Living in the Past, and The Holy Worm of Praise. He is also the author of My Dyslexia and Comforts of the Abyss. His work has been published in The New Yorker, Partisan Review, The New Republic, The Paris Review, Slate, and other magazines. He is the recipient of a Fullbright Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry.

Featured Musician: Lucas Neil

Born and raised in Milton, New York with an upbringing in musical theater and the performing arts, Lucas Neil was endowed with the beauty and responsibility of what it means to be an entertainer at a very young age.

Neil’s musical style, an acoustic blend of Americana and indie-folk, has a palpable sense of spiritual symbolism, storytelling, atmosphere, and gratitude for life.

Neil combines tastes of the great singer/songwriters of years past like James Taylor and Bob Dylan with the new-age musicality of acts like Gregory Alan Isakov and Blind Pilot.

Most important to the creation and experience of his music, Neil says, is an intimate relationship with our natural world, meaning the elements and creatures in our environment as well as our own psyche, bodies, and souls.

Neil has appeared on bills with Ryan Montbleau, Josh Rouse, and Elly Kace and has been featured in such events as the Rhode Island Folk Fest, Hartbeat Music Festival, Blackbear Music Festival, Mystic Folkways, River Glow Arts Festival, and Block Island, Rhode Island’s Conserfest, an arts festival that raises proceeds for the National Nature Conservancy.

He invites you to join him in person at one of his shows, that often range from laid back bar gigs based in song requests and laughter, to intimate listening room performances best for crying, healing, and loving.

 Featured Musician: Dylan Bolles

Dylan Bolles is a composer and arts activist who works on the interbeing of humans and more-than-humans. He lives within a 600-acre land cooperative on unceded Abenaki lands (Vermont, USA) where he is co-creating a land-based arts residency program and raising goats with his family. Dylan's music unlocks resonances between tuning theory, the harmonic series, natural systems and the sounding body through drone-based songs and site-immersive compositions. He converses with entities such as streams, caves and trees - sonic meditations on an expansive notion of voice and place - and collaborates with a wide range of talented and beautiful humans. He also writes and sings folk songs, and is honored to share this stage with his hugely experienced and talented parents. 

Matt Bolles

Matt Bolles has been active on the New England music scene for decades and has performed at many festivals and popular venues around New England and beyond. Matt plays guitar in small ensembles and plays both guitar and upright bass in larger bands. He has also been a tenor soloist for choral groups and has performed in many stage musicals. Matt teaches guitar and bass and coaches singers in his home studio.

Judy Bolles

Violinist and singer Judy Bolles has extensive experience performing in symphony orchestras and classical ensembles as well as theater, opera and dance productions, weddings and special events. She has spent equal time playing fiddle and singing in traditional folk bands in New England, offering old time, contemporary folk, swing, Irish, bluegrass and holiday music. She also performs with the Accidental Sisters, a world music acapella ensemble based in Jamestown.

Opening Voice: Mark McGuire-Schwartz 

Mark McGuire-Schwartz 

Mark McGuire-Schwartz strives to find a tad of originality in this world so overcrowded with words. This led to his creating a new poetic form, the Seventeen. Further, he believes that he may be the first person to ever use the phrase “iffy, itchy, icy, insular” in a poem. Mark is the Guilford Poet Laureate. He has published in numerous journals and anthologies and on the bottoms of rocks  His books include Loss and Laughs, Love and Fauna and 289, a book of 17s.

Opening Voice: Eleanor Kedney 

Eleanor Kedney is also the author of Between the Earth and Sky (C&R Press, 2020) and the chapbook e Offering (Liquid Light Press, 2016). Her latest book, Twelve Days From Transfer, was a 2024 New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards finalist and Between the Earth and Sky was a finalist in 2021. Her work has been published in numerous journals, magazines, and anthologies. She is the recipient of the 2019 riverSedge Poetry Prize (University of Texas Rio Grande Valley). Honors include finalist in the 2020 Mslexia Poetry Competition and American Book Fest Best Book Awards. In 2005, Eleanor founded the Tucson branch of the New York-based Writers Studio and served as the director for ten years. She joined the Tucson Poetry Festival board in 2021. Based on craft techniques utilized in her books, she developed and teaches the “Writing Toward Forgiveness” workshop.